The Itch

There are a few things in life that you just have to do.  For some it's eating.  Others feel compelled to breathe on occasion.  Para moi, the compulsion is writing.

If I discipline myself or am forced by circumstance the itch may be held at bay for days, maybe even weeks.  Take school for instance.  Robbed of my free time, I haven't been able to write properly for weeks.  Today the itch became to strong to resist.  Abandoning my studies for midterm exams tomorrow, I've broken down and started writing.

It sounds like I'm making this silt up, but I'm really not kidding.  The compulsion is like an addiction, lancing through my veins and making my hands tremble.  I'll be walking under the autumn trees, minding my own business, and suddenly the world will erupt into color, transforming into an alien landscape that looks like someone turned the saturation slider all the way up on a Monet painting done on crack.  I'll see goblins, trolls, dragons, robots, aliens, mermaids, unicorns, and demons where there were once people.  Buildings become castles and the park becomes an enchanted forest filled with mystery and intrigue.  I feel the need like a great force building up in my chest, pressure mounting so great that I know I'm going to explode if I don't get it out.

I feel the words like I feel music.  There are no shapes, no pictures, just waves of force flowing through the air.  I see a glorious sunrise as a rapid pulse of short, tight waves, and the counterbalancing darkness as a monstrous and all-consuming blast of black.  These forces flow across my skin, radiating out from my chest and down my arms, out of my fingertips and into the computer.  I throw it down like a swimmer shaking water from their hands, and as the droplets splash infinite new worlds of endless possibility rise up.  I am like the painter who is so careless he just flicks his brush across the canvas, bringing art into existence through sheer force of will.  In moments like these I don't plan, I don't edit, and I don't revise.  I simply am the writing, and the writing flows free.

Then I don't get my homework done until 4am.